Painting and Photographing

Every weekend in February, in Santa Cruz there is a special euphoria for the Carnival. On Saturday, the Children’s Home was no exeption, and there was a small typical celebration of this region of Bolivia before the arrival of the Carnival.

Despite the terrible rains that are flooding the city, next Sunday I decided to visit the kids, to chat, share, and continue our journey of learning. This time the idea was to work with the Etoys environment through the things that have the “Supplies Box”and the tool to “Draw”.

What we did was choose a short story that kids wanted to tell, and based on this story draw pictures, download another pictures from the internet, and took pictures with the Xo camera. The activity was developed pleasantly, everyone was happy drawing, selecting images from the Internet and putting together their stories inside the “Book” tool.

When it was time to take pictures with the Xo, this activity was by far loved it for all the kids, they could not stop taking pictures again and again and import them into Etoys to continue building their stories.

The positive

The euphoria with which the kids took photographs and did draws, two activities that they could easily do all the day. If we redirect creatively this attractive for photography and drawing, we have a great potential for motivation in our hands, and along with Etoys, Scratch, and other tools that promote creativity, we can develop amazing projects.

Some inconveniences

Despite some technical inconveniences (the integrated Xo mouse sometimes goes wrong, I think it is due because the moisture, but I’m not completely sure) the technical activities developed normally. The idea was to do an activity freely, make a story that the kids want to do. I had some problems at first because the kids were watching the screen, waiting for that little push to start. So I decided that for the next activity, we will build a base to start.

After reading this article, I think it’s an excellent idea to create characters and scenarios with Inkscape and then import them into our work in Etoys, we can even combine work with Inkscape (drawing), Gimp (photos) and Etoys (the assembly of our final work).

For the next meeting i will try to upload the work done by the children, and organize future workshops of Gimp and Inkscape.

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2 comments on “Painting and Photographing”

Mouse problem is an electrical charge build up due to rubbing finger across plastic. Simple trick is to rub hands together briskly and touch large object. Even better is to tape metal foil ribbon from touchpad assembly down and over rubber foot so the foil touches the surface on which the XO rests and so grounds the touchpad assembly.